Check it
first
Have you ever had reason to regret committing a few words to
print – whether an intra-office email, a snappy text sent too late to a client
after a couple of swift ones, or a blog written in righteous anger?
The trouble is it is so easy to do; there are so many
channels for half-baked words, pettish recriminations, even workaday emails
that we fail to find time to edit. Like me, you might well have framed this
kind of thought, “I truly wish I’d put in the word ‘not’ in that email to my best
client: ‘Please be clear you do owe us for this extra work.’ ” Well, at the
time, it was my best client.
Inevitably, I have to be extra vigilant. I am a professional
business writer and I try hard to maintain extremely high standards; my job is
not just to protect myself in this respect but to look after my clients. Even
if the pressure of a deadline means I don’t have a chance to reread a piece in
the cold light of the next morning, I most certainly build in time to do a
measured edit. We have to check carefully and – without being anal or editing
the baby down the plug hole – we should then check again.
This said, there are horses and there are courses. If I’m
writing a matey note to a good friend I can afford to play a bit, muck around,
drop my guard. Yet I still want the tone to be right and the message to be
intelligible.
If, at the other end of the scale, I'm writing for clients who
are trying to sell things or persuade important clients of their own to do
things, my antenna must be carefully tuned and the various tools of my trade,
intellectually and otherwise, must be sharp. I must be alert to my client’s
agenda and voice; also to particulars such as house style, or the legal
implications of certain statements. And, of course, however complex the story
might be, and whoever the audience, I must be clear and engaging.
I should explain that a friend of mine waved this subject in
my face the other day when she asked whether I thought standards of writing had
improved or worsened with the advent of new technologies. She meant since
emails and social media entered the fray. After a bit of a ponder I offered the
opinion that standards might not actually have lowered, in terms of the nature
of poor or ineffective writing – people were broadly making the same mistakes –
but I’d definitely noted a hike in the quantity of poor writing.
It may be a cop out to say that because everybody is getting
verbal dozens of times each day it is inevitable that there is more bad writing
on view. But truly, I receive emails and texts, from friends and business
colleagues alike, which take a few readings to be understood and where, in
particular, it is difficult to gauge tone. Is he cross with me? Have I done
something wrong? What meeting is he referring to?
A lot of this, sadly, is because people do not learn how to
write effectively and seem to think it is unimportant to do so. A day’s good
training could save years of pain.
My contention is that if you write more effectively you’ll think
and act more effectively too: you’ll think more about what you have to say and you’ll
act upon it. What’s more, you’ll develop the one thing that is so often missing
in good and lasting business: trust. This is because you can be trusted to
communicate information properly, and valued for the way you share it, research
it and put it to work.
I have come to believe that the general muscle in business
writing – reflecting business thinking – is considerably slacker than it ought
to be. This might be the result of the great ease, the over-felicity, with which
information is chucked about. Perhaps ideas and concepts that need a little
firming up are passed around the place too soon or are too loosely wrapped to
be useful. Perhaps our productivity is decimated by poor or unnecessary
communication.
But here I’m wandering slightly towards another pitch. My point is this: so much more could be done right now
to improve the flow and effect of information if people checked what they have
written before pressing the ‘go’ button. And, as part of checking, it would be
useful if they tried to imagine how the reader is likely to receive it.
